Back Then
by im.graff
Summary: They were different as children, you know? Akatsuki members tell us about their childhood, their friends, and villages back then. One chapter per character, not explicit, not very fluffly.
1. Hidan

When we were little we had this amazing thing going on for us that we had dubbed 'The Club'. I suppose it made us channel all our emotion towards this common enemy we called adults and basically every other child that chose to live with such 'creatures'. We were ruthless and maybe exaggerated, but what child isn't?

I believe we came to realise that the poor didn't have a voice in the socio-economic discourse, despite the pretence the government put up. Democracy never filled our bellies.

So, Yugakure, a village in a canyon, two seas nearby, linking the Land of Lighting and the Land of Fire through this amazing road. Trading was always present, no matter what and I found out later that the village had been never humble about the tariffs at the borders because that was how they got most of their capital in. This is a shame really, because if they had nullified the tariffs in exchange for protection from those two villages, they could have dropped the shinobi program. And if they had dropped the shinobi program maybe I would have been spared my cruel fate …

There we were, a bunch of twenty-seven, children, orphans. We had it good for a while, then bad, then very good again, and then worse than ever before. In times of peace we had it best and before our village changed policies regarding its militia turning to a tourist attraction, boy! We could literally taste the money. I mean it, our rice did not go stale after two weeks. However, despite the highs and the lows the most amazing thing was how I remember those things as frugal details in the present, for then they didn't mean as much.

And most will complain about hunger, as it is well understandable. But what drove us then was an animating force that most of you probably won't understand. You form attachments to those around you and those attachments make you who you are. This is evidently true. If you were the only human being on the planet, it would be impossible to determine whether you are good or bad, you would be unmatchable, obsolete. Again, obsolete even more than purely metaphorically.

I enjoy remembering the days I spent at the orphanage because it was a place of the most primitive authority. The eldest were on top, always boys, youngest on bottom, and once one of the leading minds got the hots for a girl he was kicked out. This one guy, Tee, we called him, had a mad affair with a pair of sweet-tits called Yuna who was older than him and a prostitute. He hid it well, but we ultimately found out and chased him away. He became a butcher's boy and slept underneath a closet for a few years, but I think he has it good now.

The orphanage was an old house on the outskirts of the village, on top of a very steep hill, shouldered by pine woods and a wonderful grassy meadow that spread to the mountains northwest. Here the sheep of the village took their sheep to graze. A dirty road lead up to the orphanage and on this nameless street we had barns. Barns next to barns with more barns on top. The land was cheap and the sights were beautiful, so later, when politics changed, a lot of shinobi bought the land and made pensions and hotels and restaurants and riding clubs with big, chunky horses that had been brought from the south.

Our house was the only building that had been intended as a living space. It was an abandoned mansion, the barns too were rented by the season by farmers, a nice but greedy way of the village to make money. But we had it good, we got milk and cheese quite often. No complaining.

The most interesting part about our orphanage was its independence. The eldest took care of the younglings. Actually, we had a supervisor that was theoretically keeping in touch with our instructors at the academy, but she was an old hag that was bound to resting in bed all day due to some terminal disease. She never died, but we kept her there. We had this sixteen-year-old girl, she had a square face and very prominent bone structure. Her hair was brown, her eyes I don't remember, but she forged the reports and copied the signature of the old hag every time. No one ever came to visit during the ten years I spent there.

I joined when I was six, my parents worked across the country and wanted me to make something of myself. Technically, I wasn't an orphan, but it surely didn't feel like it. My mother had waved me goodbye when I was taken away. She had cried. And I believe I cried too, but I am not sure anymore. It's okay though.

When I arrived, I was immediately enrolled to become a shinobi and was given these interesting, zip-up sandals that reached just below my knee. "Oh boy", I remember thinking, that's how cool they were. I was so happy. And it was exciting. Me and everyone at the orphanage, we had classes from seven to three in the afternoon, then we got home, and _then_ the fun would start.

The Club. The Club was our club. No shinobi, teacher, or supervisor involved. We were free and could do whatever. Oddly enough children can do very little with liberty because their wishes are simple. Take down the adults and take the candy. Both had a common solution: stealing. And we strategically called it 'deespläsm'nt'.

Ah, our code language, I didn't get to that. It's something I am still fluent in, oddly enough. And even more oddly, it has absolutely nothing to do with the regional accents or dialects. It came from the interpretative reading of a few comic books that had this weird character, Jizz, who spoke oddly. In retrospect, Jizz was a very inappropriate name for the protagonist of a children's comic book … also, his language and logic were questionable. In retrospect, the comic book was not for children, but a hidden communist protest of a small terrorist group that was eradicated when I was about ten.

I think that explains why we established military rankings for everyone. Yours truly was 'Capitän Dan' from the age of eight. That means after two years in the academy I had kicked everyone's asses. I was quite the badass. Still am.

My closest pal, Kasato Tsu, was a late recruit. I was leading my small 'bátaillon' in baggy clothes down the streets of the city. There were four of them, all in those tall sandals with peeping dirty toes from running through piles of ash and dirt – we had stolen fireworks and candied apples from a fair. And they were marching behind me, in a square, I was in front leading them. And when we reached the part where the village road turned to dirt, there was this boy in a perfectly fitted linen shirt, holding the hand of his sister. They had closed-toe leather boots on with a bit of a heel and thick soles, a rarity. She was probably nine, me and him were eleven.

"Bátaillon, holt!" was the first thing I said and they clicked their heels behind me and gathered together, sack of goods in the middle. "Whü ar' yoü?" I then asked.

"My name is Kasato Kutsu and this is my little sister, Emi", he cockily added and fluffed his well-dressed chest. It pissed me off instantly.

"Wha' do yoü want?" I was on fire, I was going to take him down, beat him to a pulp. Though at that time, I was not bent on killing anyone just after meeting them.

"We ran away from home", he explained loudly and I saw the heads of people gathering in the windows, we had to be quick. I compromised, what can I say? I went right up to him.

"Whay?"

"Well, our parents are getting a divorce-"

"A deevors?" I was so angry, I cut him right off, "Too bád. Whainy beech positi'n häs been takin'."

"Where are we to go? On the streets?" He was desperate, but still cocky, and by that point I was through with him. I just didn't seem to know how to get our candied apples past them without them assaulting us. Don't ask, I simply knew he would.

So, I had to negotiate: "Whay should we täk' yoü in?"

And then he swept me off my feet … No one in my life has been able to evoke the same feeling of pure adoration and fascination and perfect pleasure of anticipation. He took out a wooden box, opened it and looked me right in the eye. Chocolate.

"Chäklit prälinsss!" Everyone behind was ecstatic, drumming with their feet and lifting the dust from the ground, applauding. And I was smirking, obviously.

Needless to say, he and his little sister came with us. And the first thing we did was placing the goodies in the storage room where a boy named May counted every single food item, every praline, and made note of them in our register. Then we took them upstairs to the 'king', a boy about sixteen who would soon capitulate and run away with his girlfriend, Matsuya. To this day I regret having given him some of that chocolate. Bastard would die if I encountered him on the street today. The king jackass asked them where they came from and why they were there and they repeated everything.

"From 'dis däy on", he proclaimed as we were all used to, "yoü go by dee näm'of Tsu and 'Ime."

"Why change the-" Tsu began and everyone, myself included, eyed him judgementally, especially the king. If a sixteen year old had been forced to speak in that impossible language, he, too, would. Hence he paused and tried to correct himself, failing despite all efforts: "Uay chiengi di-"

The king explained angrily: "We hav' dis deesléxic keed, Jun, whü kent reed mor' than three lett'rs."

"I see!" And I obviously intervened: "Yoü meen: "Aye si!" … Funnily, I'd later find out that 'aye' and 'si' were synonyms for 'yes', but in different languages.

In school we were all just beginning to learn how to write, so having a fucked up pronunciation made things very difficult for our teacher. Tsu was attending a normal school and thanks to him I was able to pass my writing tests. He became a member of the club with provisory residence rights despite he's parents picking him up that very same afternoon. He would bring us more chocolate and on his first birthday, I gave him a pair of new sandals that I had received from our teacher that year. His sister had tried to kiss me, which was a very bad thing at that time, so she was shunned for life. Poor Emi. She'd send me letters for some reason, and books too through her brother as to "show [me] what true words look like". Sweet Emi. Always sending me these depressing books filled with poems about war and death and longing and unreciprocated love. One of them was about Jashin, a series of ballads about this hardcore god of death … After reading it, I didn't know if I had a crush on her or on him. It was him though, in the end.

Things went downhill when we grew older. There we were: a military mediocre country with a kink for tariffs and taxes that stripped foreigners and importing merchants raw of money. Inevitably, this fetish was satiated with a cruel attack on two fronts. The Kumo shinobi from the North, and the Konoha ANBU from the south. Officially, Konaha never admitted to the attack. Even the ANBU had operated under a contract with Kumo. Yugakure was never specifically mentioned.

A few days before turning sixteen and becoming 'king' myself, we found out that the shinobi program had been cut. The orphans of twelve years or older were enrolled in a rehabilitation program, where we would be thought over the course of two years how to become mailmen, binmen, or another vast array of dirty-ass jobs that would be paid three times better. My pals accepted the change, happy to not be sent on poorly rewarded missions anymore. But it was understandable, they were all very poorly prepared and had only been assigned fetch-jobs. Not one of us had proved to be able to master elemental jutsu, most of them tired after running ten kilometres, and forget target practicing.

I had been on more missions, and by that time I had killed. And it was something I couldn't back away from. Not I, not the other older shinobis, although most of them had complied. The rest I saw every night scooting back home from filthy pubs. It took me one day as a fucking binman to realise that I hated it. It was embarrassing. My co-worker, Miyo, had been one for his whole life. He was twice as old as I was, a heavy smoker, always going on and on about women. As much as I hate him, he thought me most of the vulgarities I know today. He swore most of the time at himself, calling himself an idiot for not having been able to learn better, and the rest of the time he made fun of me for being "a pathetic little bastard who pities his lousy cock because he had a cute dream".

One night, he brought my mother into it and I killed him good. It was a clean cut, across his neck, I pushed him in the wagon with the garbage bins, hit the ox that pulled it and went off to Tsu's house and climbed to Emi's open window. She had become so beautiful, with her thick black hair and slightly tan skin, freckles over her cheeks, and neck and slit arms. I knocked at her window and she smiled up to me with those small dark eyes, and I kissed her, obviously. It was nice and I promised her she would be my girl for life. Tsu could bite me. We were men, we don't say goodbye. Although, I might have cried if we had, and maybe that was exactly the reason why we should have.

I am sorry, Tsu. He might be happy to hear that I have met this hell of a bastard on the road, I preach from Jashin's scripture and he gets pissed off. We fight, and it's satisfying. Maybe he'd tell Emi that I still have her book. I wonder if she killed herself in the end …

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><p>Hello everyone! This will be a short series, one Akatsuki member per chapter. I hope you enjoy it, I hope I rated it correctly. Let me know what you think!<p>

Note: "Kasa" means umbrella in Japanese, "to" means and, and "tsu" from "kutsu" meaning Shoe. Kasato Tsu: roughly "Umbrella and Shoes". 'Ime from "hime", meaning princess.

Much love,

GRaff.

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.


	2. Kakuzu

Where I come from? What I know?

Takigakure is an interesting place. It's been built around a deep lake circling this huge, majestic, ancient tree and was surrounded by even more forests. It was a shady place. Sun barely came through the leaves, which begs the obvious question: Why did my people develop a slightly darker than usual skin if they were living in the shadows? I think we were all shady.

We had this huge water dam connected to the lake that would flow into an abrupt cascade on one end. On the opposite part of the lake, another canal connected to a river, the river connected to the Northern Sea. Principal commercial rout of the village. The waters were fascinatingly clear and deep, even close to the edge of the lake. The surface was split into portions for ships, smaller boats, and bathing. Two things come to mind when I think of that lake.

First of all, we had this bridge connecting the shore to the tree in the middle. And it was made of hollow cylinders made out of caoutchouc that were carrying long wooden planks that had been put vertically on top. From the beginning, this structure was not the most stable one. People also liked to steal the cylinders to transport their own things. So, over time the contraption lost its stability.

The second memorable detail were these huge water lilies with huge white flowers the size of your head, and sturdy leaves that reached up to two metres in diameter. I suppose everything in Takigakure is huge: the tree, the flowers, the people … Either way, they were a pest really, infesting the lake within a week. But everyone would gather those plants and make jam out of the sweet flower, and the long root got pickled. Just those huge leaves would be thrown away. One was not allowed to leave the leaf behind for it would drift towards the dam and clog it. As kids, we were sent every Sunday to gather those plants. You'd have to dive in, then you'd cling to the root and go as deep as you could and cut it off. I never managed more than thirty metres, but the depths went on and on, or so it seemed.

One Sunday, after I had reaped one such plant, something happened. I was holding the white flower with one hand on my head, petals all in my eyes like a too long wig, then the leaf under the other arm and the root loosely around my neck. A fat village elder, who resembled a sphere more than anything else, decided to march to the 'Holy Tree' and do some sort of official stuff. I knew people would vote in the afternoon for a new village head, so I was curious to see what he was up to. He and his lackeys began walking above our heads and as he stepped on the middle of this long plank that was unsupported from below, he broke it. He broke the bridge spurting water like a horny whale would. The water from the wave hit me in the face and, since I was obviously laughing, a lot of it entered my lungs. Spasms made me fight with the water and I got tangled in the root of my lily. I nearly drowned.

Luckily, my mother was upset with me for coming home empty-handed and gave me a smacking. I forgot about the accident, the lost flower, even about the bridge for the time being. It came to mind later on though, when I killed the fat bastard. I gave him a smacking for everyone to remember.

My mother was a terrifying woman, because she was scared, but she refused to acknowledge it. Using my endurance and abilities to gather lilies, she'd sell almost everything she made at the market three times a week. We were living in this typical small dock-house that almost everyone had with three rooms, one for provisions, one big common room with a stove and three beds, and a festivities room, opened just during the major holidays. I slept in the boat outside on the dock in summer, and up in the attic between our fire wood and our tools in winter. My parents slept in separate beds. My father was usually gone on missions, and I think my mother felt guilty of sleeping next to him after she had shared her bed with another, after he had shared his with another. They stuck together for survival, I think.

My father had told me one thing repeatedly throughout his life, namely to never drink before eight in the evening. And as you can imagine I didn't _really_ understand why until he returned from a mission early one day, got drunk, and drowned. Obviously, my mother cried, but not because of sadness, but because of anger. I was growing fast and ate a lot and it was pissing her off. She'd go on and on about it and it made me irascible. I don't know if I can accuse her of my temper, but she surely didn't help. However, I knew she was worried that we didn't have enough. She'd say: "I don' even know whether to be happy you'se a boy or not no mo". Maybe I resemble her more than I know. I'd like to know. Even then, before she disappeared, I was wondering about this.

Our women were deemed beautiful. I never took my mother for a beautiful woman, but I admit that she was a conventionally attractive one. She was tall and slender with thick thighs and broad shoulders that were outclassed by her "fine ass booty and them breasteses" as her husband so eloquently explained to his entourage of scrubs. Or was it one of his whores he was going on about?

As it turned out, women were disappearing from the village because they were sold as prostitutes or, if they were too rowdy, as individual organs. I couldn't really feel angry about what happened. I just accepted it.

People nowadays label it as hopelessness, but it wasn't. You just got accustomed to it and incorporated it in a routine. Wake up, check; wonder if someone's going to cut you open for your kidneys, check; drink sufficiently to numb the pain; and so on and so forth. Oddly enough, everyone, myself included, became complacent. Instead of doing something about it, we just went with it.

It wasn't until Suzu came to me one night that I figured out something needed to be done. She was one of the girls that lived in my neighbourhood, for half my life she had been taller than me. I even envied her for diving deeper than I could. She hadn't been kidnapped, because she was truly, very ugly. To the point all of us harassed her about it. I'd like to believe that her indifference towards our comments and spitting and rock-throwing followed her when she went to bed, but experience has shown me that that was must have been nearly impossible.

She came to me, well –that's not true. Those friends of mine pushed her at my door and she fell against it. I was in the attic and jumped behind her and was greeted by my friends and fellow shinobi of Takigakure.

"Kuzu, you'se old enough, ain't ya?", they giggled and pointed at her, "She ain't half bad, boy."

She was hunched over and she was almost naked. The front of her blouse was ripped open and even in the middle of the night I could see something glistening darkly on her legs. The blouse was all she had on.

The way they were licking at their lips, trousers barely hanging from their hips, swaying in place slightly … the bottles in their hands: they were all drunk. Worst of all they kept talking, groggily coughing in between: "You go ahead and then Lynch here sells her. Want in on it?"

It hadn't bothered me that Suzu was the one suffering, but it had bothered me that they were the ones doing it to her. Our men, selling off our women. I decided to kill them like any other enemy I had encountered before. And for once I got really angry. Suzu stayed with me for a few days and couldn't leave anymore. It would be nice to tell you that it ended well, but it didn't.

In the end, I understood that the difference between Suzu and a broken jar was merely the amount they were worth on the black market. Virtually, everyone has a price. You, me, your beloved ones. A market value. And society keeps us alive out of need, if it isn't to produce offspring then at least for publicity, still a need. Ideas can be sold. Even philosophy can be sold. Laws can be shared. If you adopt my laws, then neither of us have to hire a bunch of lawyers … Who the fuck cared about Suzu in the end? Weak and ugly, a good diver though, probably a caring girl. Although I console myself by arguing that she would have been more likely to kill me in my sleep than anything else.

To this day, I cannot explain why my village stole and raped and backstabbed each other the way they did and probably still do. We were never poor. Most were quite rich, maybe not me or my friends, but at that time even I found those lilies to be sufficient. It's perverse, I agree.

What I know is very little and very insignificant. A ramble. At the end of the day, I just hope to not be complicating my life more than needed. I don't regret letting Suzu go, I never even liked her. I don't regret my decisions, I made them for a reason, a good reason at that. I am not a good man, and I never pretended to be. And that's the only truth I can be sure of.

But I wish I hadn't realised all this when I was fifteen.

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><p>Hello everyone! I usually add a little fun note at the end of certain chapters, but this right here is too serious. Sadly, I was inspired by crimes reported to have happened in our modern day society. I know that what I have written here in on the verge of grotesque, but if it were less so, I think it wouldn't be serious enough.<p>

Much love,

GRaff.

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.


	3. Kisame

Picture everyone you know, all friends and family members and acquaintances. At gatherings and meetings and graduations and parties and weddings. Okay?

Now take them out of the picture. All of them. What you are probably left with are spaces. Many spaces with different purposes. You'll see a dining room with a table for one person, a classroom with a lamp for a teacher, a graduation attended by your certificate, drunken parties where you hook up with yourself probably. I never got to a weeding, but I remain optimistic.

Most of you will find it hard to do this little exercise and I am happy about it. Sure, it means you are deluded and ignorant towards the suffering of others, but I think you have it good and without you as examples of happiness then the rest of us might not know what to secretly dream about. Keep at it!

And it might sound selfish to speak of absolute, numbing solitude as I was never technically alone. I had many people around me, but I didn't care much for them as they didn't care much for me. After all, this entire mind set was part of training. Truthfully, the irony of it all was what kept me smiling and I'd lie if I'd say it wasn't entertaining.

My first memories would be those of pre-school. I've been in school all my childhood, from the age of two. Mostly, I can only remember the indoors of said establishment. It was a huge place that had a displeasing staleness to it. Many stairs. And for some reason, I can only remember a lot of white walls and blue carpets on the floors. If I'd have to be specific: The very first memorable event was an afternoon my whole class spent on the balcony of the building overseeing the whole village. It was very chilly outside, but I enjoyed it for some reason. I sneaked my feet through the metal fence that should have kept us from falling in an attempt to take the unobstructed scenery in. The buildings seemed so big! So, so big. I remember gasping loudly. The world was made for giants, not me. But I couldn't look away. I wanted to be part of it so bad, so, so bad. I must have been pressing forward in excitement because I fell through the handrail, down a couple stories, onto the hay roof of a shack where they kept some goats. I think I was some sort of fatass because I broke the roof and it collapsed onto the animals below. That's when I got my first smacking ... Kisame, the Goat Killer. Bad boy from birth, son!

On my first day of academy, we had been put in one long line, a kunai with a red piece of cloth symbolising blood in our right hand and we marched –yes, marched!– into class. People approached me eager to mock me for my looks. They were _that_ jealous. Once we established that, yes, I looked like their dinner, and that my conception involved a kinky night with a fish, we jumped at each other's throats and everyone let us because it is "natural for children to express the predator within". I remember an empty classroom and a lamp because I sat front row at a desk for one, everyone jammed behind me as close to the exit as possible, not even the teacher dared to enter my line of sight. For what it's worth, I will never forget that lamp.

I lived alone, in an apartment by myself. And my neighbours, boy: Did they love me or what? They had this incredible problem with me slamming my door shut when I came home at night. Apparently, it was reason enough for them to report me to the building manager, a very capricious man named Buya. As punishment he turned the heating in my apartment off. I don't know if you have ever been in mouldy house, but it isn't nice. When you're sore and tired, you also don't want to shower with water colder than the rain in winter. Or maybe it's just me.

Nevertheless, I had my revenge. I think that for years to come it haunted every resident. The first step was to begin practicing my maniacal laughs. The voice of a seven-year-old is soft, but I think that's what made it even more creepy. I would wake up at three in the morning, two hours before endurance training began, and prepared my tools: a pair of scissors, a woollen black mask that only let my eyes be visible, and a bobby pin. My theme song of choice? Scatters of a ghostly demented laughter, of course.

Important to note is that one of the services the Mizukage had absolutely insisted upon and managed to convince the council to adopt were the 'Mist Higher Postal Services'. Fantastic tool to filter spam from mail and convince the people to put their trust into their leaders by having their mail delivered in the middle of the night. I bet you, censorship had never sounded better! Everyone knew it was happening. If a letter or a package promised a photo or a gift that was never received, it wasn't a novelty.

So, I put on my mask and waited for the mailman hidden expertly in the staircase. When he left, I went to the mailboxes and one by one I opened them and took out the mail. People received a lot of newspapers and flyers and coupons, but my biggest interest was letters. Letters people got from their relatives and children that had moved away or sisters in the countryside or husbands on missions. I would dampen the glue that kept the envelope shut and take out the letter. I read them greedily, eager to see what parents talked about with their children or lovers with each other. When I was done, I held the unfolded the paper and cut the last two lines of the letters off, then resealed them, put them back and ran away with the snippets.

Back in my room I'd arrange all of them in some way to be funny and read the odd text over a cup of tea: "Would like to make it/ I miss your delicious dumplings/ can't wait to savour your juicy dumplings/ the devastating disaster that took so many lives/ with such wonderful ability to/ cha-cha all night long/ yours truly".

I knew that "dumplings" was a euphemism for all sorts of lady parts depending on the context. Which made everything even more ridiculous. After I had my fun, I'd mix the endings a bit and put them aside. When I came home from school, I'd sneak into the houses of people and randomly drop a snippet off. You can imagine that the old couple that lived next to me was not thrilled at the prospect of their dead son dancing "cha-cha all night long" and the lonely butcher above me, hearing that his gay partner couldn't "wait to savour juicy dumplings", might have picked up a drinking habit which I may or may not be responsible for. We'll never know!

When I was ten I finally graduated and moved out with my sensei, Fuguki Suikazan, a very unpleasant, strict fellow that liked to shut me up by saying that small-talk got good men killed. After knowing him a few months, I dared him to name one and he said he'd grill me.

I don't know whether I was cute when I was younger or not, but many girls approached me … we could argue about what "many" means, but that's beside the point. We talked and they were all chatty. Thinking back, they had very similar personalities. Bold and attractive and always eager to grab some grub and go for walks at night. All had brown hair.

Mia I met when I was twelve. She was one year older than me and she came from a very dysfunctional family. The biggest issue was her father, always her father. Since I never met mine, I kept asking her to fill me in on what was going on in her life and what she hoped for. Back then, I thought that I'd probably make a good psychologist. Mia explained that her father had been one of those candidates for a special shinobi development program and that he had been kept away from his family when he had been seven. Needless to say that the training had only evoked frustrations and he failed in the role of the ultimate fighter. The sole thing he could focus on was family. That didn't explain the way he hit on his own daughter. Apparently, he complimented her beauty all the time and gave her inappropriate kisses on the neck. Mia had dinner with me and went home just to sleep. She enrolled in medical school at some point and moved on campus there and once the threat of rape bothered her no more, she deemed it okay to bother me no more. It pissed me off because I had hoped she'd call me over to her new place and have supper to celebrate. I had hoped to kiss her.

I got my first kiss when I was older, about fifteen, I think. You could say it took me a while to get over the fact that my only friend had betrayed me, but it couldn't be helped. I met Nao when I was sent to the hospital after a bad mission that had me beaten up good. He was working as a nurse there and I mistook him for a girl when I started flirting with him. But that discovery did not make me stop him from playing nurse with me one day. He knew what he was doing and it was damn hot. To this day, that is some of the best sex I have had. After all, one does not easily forget surprise penis.

So, that happened … Afterwards I began to go out more, mainly because I got pretty confident. But it didn't go to well. You see, after being a misanthrope for your whole life and never getting to form proper connections with people you could say that I was rather creepy. My mannerisms evolved from my finding out what _not_ to do. Needless to say I went back to being cautious and almost shy within a few weeks and it wasn't the most pleasant of experiences.

If I could go back and redo my past, maybe I'd force myself to not care about people so much, think less, and just go with it all. But I think that has to do more with temperament than personality and temperament cannot be changed. This means that whatever I think I could have done differently, couldn't be done. I like people … and have high hopes – or better said: I have high expectations of them. Laugh if you must!

In the end, not changing was quite good, was it not? Itachi …

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><p>Hello everyone! I hope you have liked this chapter. To be honest, I had a hard time trying to slip into Kisame's shoes, but in the end I decided that he is sort of an optimistic cynic -if that makes any sense. He always left me the impression that he was easy-going by nature, but his philosophy reflected a certain gravity, that people are only motivated by their selfishness and greed. If I should have gotten it wrong, I'd be more than happy to receive your criticism.<p>

I am very grateful and humbled by your support and your reviewing or liking this story. It helps me out a lot too and I hope you keep expressing your honest opinions.

Thank you for reading and thank you for your time!

Much love,

GRaff.

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.


	4. Itachi

I want wars to end, but I never truly understood them as to come up with a solution. Apparently, years of experience lead me to fixate on two extremes: absolute evil and utopic good. Envisioning utter destruction and hoping for universal love. And none of those two scenarios could actually come true.

The events in my past and my motivations behind them have become public news. Which isn't really comforting. I believe it will take another thousand years and some serious human experimentation to understand subjective reasoning. Somehow, I don't see that happening in a world where half of the people deny the fact that our planet is not flat and where people can still be "cursed with stupidity".

The first time I heard that expression I was eight and I could not understand what my father meant by it. One of my cousins, who was around twenty, was summoned in the shrine of the Uchiha clan for an exorcism. My parents and other members of the family believed that his eyes, the precious Sharingan, might have been cursed with a genjutsu because the boy simply couldn't read. His writing too had suffered, distorting words like "believe" into "plievee". He had been doomed to remain a genin and, as to not bring embarrassment to us all, he became the lackey of the police station, fetching tea for everyone, every day. What I assisted was an intervention in a line of many, where ten casters pierced his skull with long metal needles and fried different pieces of the brain until they brought forth the evil spirits. I think the constant electrocuting might have permanently disabled different parts of his brain which ultimately resulted in paralysis. Pardon: thy demon was brought forth, and thus thee fell … Even then, I found that never giving a man a chance for being dyslexic is an exaggeration.

Logic often eludes our minds. Some of us might have been born with this inability; some of us might have developed it. I have never met a person who has not been, at least at some point in their life, affected by some sort of mental parasite, an illness that they had to fight to control or that simply took over.

Of course, no one is always rational or optimistic or happy or logical in a world where death might occur spontaneously, where terror looms its way into politics, where tailed disasters might just pop up for total annihilation. But I want to hope that there is the possibility for people to be happy and sad under ideal conditions. And maybe this boils down to establishing a lawful good to govern the world that takes the roles, circumstances, and emotions of its subjects into consideration.

It is crucial to speak of the state of a society and what it deems normal. For me, normal should not be what I have been made to understand. When the nine-tails attacked Konoha, I remember having a gut feeling that normality would change as it usually does when a calamity strikes a nation. Missions became harder, longer, and under those circumstances I found it easy to forget the little things in life that made me happy. My mother, my lovely mother … she had this album of photos of our family that reconstructed major memories in colourful pictures. She had dedicated a section to my life and after I returned from an assassination mission she handed me this book saying: "Maybe it will cheer you up." I got stuck on those pictures of me for a long time, but I fixated on this one photo of me as a baby, smiling brightly and cheerfully pushing a little boat in the pond in our garden. I was probably three.

For years to come I would go back to this album and seek this picture out and look at it for a good long while. It was when I became a chunin when it hit me that it was the only evidence of me laughing. All other photos showed a frown, a disinterested glance, or an absent, ghostly smile. That happiness had disappeared when I had been forced to understand the world. From the looks of it, that experience must have been horrible. Maybe that concrete, eternal evidence of happiness was what had given me hope to change the fate of my younger brother. The hope that he would face a brighter future.

Fighting from a young age I was able to notice a long array of substances that shinobi took in order to sharpen their minds, relax and cure their anxiety, become more confident before an attack. I first snorted caffeine when I was five, when a mission had me concentrating for ten hours. When I became a chunin and started using my Sharingan often, my dad upgraded me to cocaine: every time after a mission to numb the pain in my eyes, strengthen my bones, and reduce inflammation of wounds. The doses kept growing with age and were probably the reason for the degradation of my lungs and heart. Pills for sleeping, pastes for headaches, leafs for nightmares, tinctures for anxiety. Belladonna for ulcers, opium for sensory sensitivity, blue lotus for inhibitions, betel nut for giving the impression that you are not suffering from hypothermia, when actually you really are.

It's rather funny how some never questioned the damage these drugs caused. Most of us, not only the Uchiha, have a hole in the cartilage that separates the nostrils. In my clan, the rebels would fashion a kinky piercing to put through the tear, but those were few. Shisui let me in on this and I went with him one day to get one too, but both of us chickened out.

I was seven when I detected the hole in my nose. It started bleeding one day and I rolled a piece of cloth firmly and stuck it up, but I pushed too hard and too quickly and it went through the damaged cartilage. I sported the wound of my addiction before many of my acquaintances. My father warned me to never tell my mother about it, and later on I understood why.

Addiction is not a pretty thing and proud shinobi, which is basically every shinobi, would never admit to it. Smoking and alcohol were addictive drugs. Medicine for combat could not possibly classify as such, not in the same sense. Couple that with stress and trauma on the battlefield and you have yourself some cognitive impairment. Dear gods, why was it never taken seriously?

Surely, an attempt of the renowned Medical School of Fire was emotional therapy basing all disorders on the theory of Yin and Yang. The only good conclusion in this particular case was that, indeed, perception was a key element in understanding how our minds work. But other than that it did nothing to address the root of the problem. You can only stick so many needles in a person's skin to determine what they are suffering from and heal them. But maybe future generations will think it works. Personally, I am against it.

Shisui had become quite primitive when he spoke about this, narrowing everything down on sexual compensation for one's emotional needs. For the record, most of his ideas were intelligent, but not this one. He guided me in an attempt to cure what he called my "blue balls" when I was about eleven. He told me that a good snort and a firm pump on a dark night was all I needed. And it was quite lovely, the only problem was that I could not get excited without the sweet chemicals lending me a hand. I never understood intimacy, not alone, not with any future lover, one of the reasons why I dreaded human contact and avoided it. It always seemed shallow, incomplete, fake.

I have difficulty believing that the world is mentally prepared to face change mostly because it still relies on masses of disturbed individuals that destroy everything they don't understand and they don't understand many things. And I was one of them for the most part of my life.

Eventually, I had become captain of an ANBU squad and had to overthrow my family. The public knows what went down on a certain night. Every day following that event I remembered the faces of people dying, the streets flooding with blood, my younger brother screaming in shock. It all came to mind as a vivid film, not as a memory. It plagued my mind and I couldn't control it.

Kisame, I wonder if your advice on quitting drugs was a good one. I never got rest afterwards, not once. And every day I wondered how sweetly my brother would kill me. To be honest, I don't know what I was craving more, the induced rushes or something to fill a void in me. Yet another example of how a sick mind operates. You see poetry behind every numbing moment. It felt like I was in a deep pit that was filling up slowly with the blood of every single person I killed. Maybe I got to imagine this after my partner said that my eyes were pools of blood … My problem was that I was shackled to the bottom and I couldn't escape. And once it threatened to drown me the only reason I stretched my neck as long as I could was the wish to die in a certain way, by the hands of a certain someone. In happy moments of agony, I felt the embrace of this person against my skin. My body remembered the warmth, the pressure so vividly that I even resorted to hug back against it. And when I did, a few scenes played before my eyes, Sasuke's eyes and his voice and his laugh and his pout. Such love would haunt me.

Does anyone get how wrong it is to get to live, to _truly_ live, in mere remembered fragments of existence?

My childhood is a tragedy. And this tragedy can be glorified to encourage togetherness of people. I wish future generations find it, but in reality, not in dreams. And more than everything, I wish for peace, especially peace of mind.

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><p>Hello everyone! I'd like you to note something: Kishimoto's world is inspired by medieval history and this is a critique at the perception of mental illness in those primitive ages of understanding.<p>

For some reason, I always imagined that Itachi had intimacy issues and that he was a dreamer, despite his mathematical logic in combat. I hope that these stories are entertaining in a way. To be honest, finding something to add to a character whose portrait has been pretty well covered in the original storyline was hard. So I decided to exploit two of Itachi's physical disabilities that I have noticed: his stamina and his aggressive coughing later on. If you have something to add, drop a line. If there's something to complain about, I'd gladly receive criticism.

Much love,

GRaff.

Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.


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